Читать книгу Entanglement - Katy Mahood, Katy Mahood - Страница 21

15 October 1977

A blue bulb of vein stood out in John’s father’s neck, his hands thrust firmly in the pockets of his trousers as John’s mother cried and stared at the tiny swell of Stella’s belly. Picking at the skin around her fingers, a slight tremor in her hands, she didn’t look at her son as she spoke.

‘But, John … what about your research? The post-doc position?’

Stella felt a wave of hot hatred for this weak woman, with her tailored clothes and her pearls and her nervous birdlike hands. Do you not understand, Stella wanted to scream, that this is the 1970s and my studies are important too? She gripped John’s hand, feeling her cheeks burn as they sat down to a roast dinner in the front room. John’s mother talked without pause as she handed around the vegetables, while his father sat in silence, grimly slicing chicken.

Stella had never believed in love at first sight. Deep down she knew it for what it really was: a rush of blood to the genitals. But when she’d spilled John’s drink in that wood-panelled pub, even in her deepest embarrassment she’d felt something happen to her; it was as if a hidden door had opened. Thoughts came rushing in unbidden; thoughts that to her horror corresponded in no way to the passionate feminist politics she had argued over pints of cheap lager. Like a dark and dirty secret, Stella had become entranced by whisperings of tablecloths and fresh flowers, roast dinners on a Sunday, a warm body in her bed.

They had met again, by chance, in the library. His lopsided smile revealed wonky teeth, his hands were not quite sure of where to put themselves.

‘It is you!’

Stella had been relieved when she saw that he was pleased to see her. ‘Good job there are no liquids nearby,’ she’d said, trying to disguise the symphony swelling inside. They’d ended up at the same pub as before and John grinned with delight as she’d paid for two pints before he’d opened his wallet. It was still light when they left and they headed north across the park, walking hand in hand towards the small wooded part in the middle, where they’d sat down and kissed, tipsy in the long grass. He had walked her home later, said he hoped to see her soon.

A few days later she had seen him in the student union. There was a party the following weekend, he’d said. Some friends – here he had gestured around the group of young post-docs with whom he sat – a get-together in his flat, with guitars and a few drinks. ‘You could bring your fiddle,’ he’d said, pointing at the violin she was carrying. Looking around the gangly, T-shirted group (scientists, all of them, she’d thought with a certain distain), Stella had found herself surprised that John was a musician as well as a theoretical physicist. He spent his days translating the mysteries of the world into the tidy language of mathematics; how then, she wondered, did he suspend this orderly thought and feel his way within the music? For her, music was of the body; it was the world explained as feeling, sound and sense. She’d tried to imagine what that abandonment was like for him. Sounds fun, she’d said, feigning nonchalance, and John had watched her walk away, perplexed by the disorder of his thoughts whenever she was near.

The following Saturday, Stella had walked through an early evening Kilburn still thick with people. When she reached John’s flat, someone had buzzed her in and she’d climbed the stairs right to the top of the old Victorian house. Through the half-open door, the music came, invisible waves that smoothed the faint chaos of the city-sound outside. She walked into a room full of people and saw John and his guitar in a circle of girls and Stella felt her breath catch short. She was suddenly conscious of her homemade skirt and how the strap of her battered violin case was making her chest lopsided. From the way those girls were leaning towards him, their hair falling loose around their faces, the flushed fullness of their breasts held before them like weaponry, it was clear that they knew about sex in a way that she did not. Nauseous with the need to leave, she had thought that she would walk away, but something fixed her to the spot. Guitar sounds rang around her as she lifted the violin from its case, breathing in its scent of wood and resin and tucking it tight beneath her angled chin.

Across the landscape of her brain, small cities came alight. A trail of neuron fire was taking hold, its electric pulses compelling her hands to move, touch, change, strike. All around her as she played, the air leapt up and danced. Invisible waves moved within mathematical space, their liquid peaks melting into one another like ghosts, the confluence of violin-song and guitar jostling and weaving into harmony. And in all this, as unseen as sound itself, something else collided, rising between them with a force both ancient and new-born: the purest of forms, the most primitive of impulses.

From then on they had spent most of their free time together. After a day spent working in the library, Stella would meet John at the physics lab and they would walk together through the park. As the autumn days had shortened, their walks changed course, skirting the edge of that wide, dark space. Along the dim-lit bridleway they shared stories of their research: Stella talking fast and tripping over her words to tell him of the literary works she’d discovered in the London Library; women writers who’d been all but lost to history. She was going to put them on the map, make people hear them, she’d said one night, clasping John’s hand tight in her excitement. More steadily, with deep pauses as he sought the right words to use, John had spoken about his work. Quantum entanglement was not something that slipped easily from mathematics into general conversation. But in those early days when every thought was fascinating, Stella had wanted desperately to understand just what it was that filled John’s mind when she was not with him. And he, in turn, had felt the tug of two loves and the scalding urge to swallow them both whole.

How did two particles become entangled, and why did they behave in the way they did? What was this spooky action at a distance; and how could it be explained? He’d told her about Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen and Schrödinger – of the bafflement of the first three of those eminent men at what came to be known as the EPR paradox. Quantum entanglement must be an impossible phenomenon, they’d claimed. Because by affecting immediate change in each other, no matter the distance that separated them, the entangled particles broke one of the fundamental rules of relativity: that nothing travels faster than the speed of light. But, he explained as Stella linked her arm through his, over and again experiments had shown that this is how it works. That despite not knowing why, these entangled particles do exist in a state and as part of a system that appears to break the laws of physics. And despite her miserable grade 5 at O level, Stella had understood the fascination of what he was doing: how he was finding the gaps in established knowledge and shaping a new language for what was missing.

John was known to be brilliant, but among his peers he had always been considered a little off-the-wall, particularly when he spoke about this latest project. His controversial hypothesis was the subject of furious debate around the department, but absorbed in love and the mysteries of entanglement, much of this controversy had passed John by. For the rest of that year his research had proved particularly fruitful. Ideas had zipped like potassium across water, flaring for a minute with a brilliant light, then dying back into the dark. And though some evenings he would leave the university buildings desolate and empty of ideas – How could he explain? They were speaking the wrong language – each morning, as he’d watched the city moving and pulsing about itself on his way down the Edgware Road, the spark would glow again. There was something in this; he knew there was.

Almost a year from the day that he had sat dry-mouthed in the Dean’s office for his doctoral viva, he had – at his parents’ insistence – attended a graduation ceremony. After lunch, Stella had joined them for drinks, laughing at John still in his robes. The conversation flowed amicably with the wine that afternoon and after they’d bade his parents goodbye, John had suggested another drink. The bar was packed with other red-robed PhDs and a few familiar faces had waved and shouted greetings across the smoky room. As the noise and heat began to rise, Stella had slipped her arm beneath his gown and whispered in his ear and soon they were walking into the park, their half-drunk bottle of wine corked with a tissue in her handbag. They’d found a secluded spot and sat down, swigging from the bottle, the rough wine sharp against their throats. The evening light had given the park a golden tone and Stella felt a sudden shot of clarity, as if this moment was destined to become a memory. John had rolled up his trousers and tossed his cap on the grass beside him, looking back at her with the lowering sun in his face.

‘Stella?’

She’d moved to sit beside him, kicking off her sandals. Her white feet had burrowed into the rich green of the long grass, a faint tracery of blue veins across them.

‘Stella, I really do love you, you know.’

She’d turned then and looked at this man, the angular slant of his shoulders brushed by his light brown hair, the wide hands that were clasped at either side of her waist. His face was tense, as if struggling with a devilish maths problem and she’d smiled at how much that must have cost him to say.

Pushing him gently to the ground, she’d leaned across him. ‘I love you too, John.’

Ten days later, they had stood at Paddington Station waiting for Stella’s train to Bristol. John pressed his face into her gold-streaked hair in a last embrace.

‘It’s only for two weeks,’ she’d whispered, trying to ignore the tug within her throat.

They’d kissed and then she’d run, waving as she climbed aboard the train, thinking only of home and her parents and the rolling green landscape that would soon unspool to take her there.

Her father had been waiting at Bristol Temple Meads, car keys jangling in his hand. She’d slipped her arm through his and they had walked together out of the grand old station and into the cloudy warmth of that late July evening. At home, her mother had held her tight and kissed her cheeks.

‘My baby’s home!’ she’d laughed, appraising the young woman before her, with her stack of books and washing. Later, in the kitchen, they had sat down to eat together and talked about her brother and his year in France, her research and the writers she’d uncovered in the archives, the house repairs – an endless litany of things to do.

‘Victorian houses,’ sighed her father as his after-dinner cigarette glowed bright.

The week had drifted past. Stella ate and slept and read. She walked with her mother to the shops and helped in the garden, sweating in the muggy heat of the overcast summer. Around her everything had seemed quite as it should be. And yet. There was, she noticed, a shift she couldn’t quite describe: an unlatching, or perhaps an ebbing away. She would find herself suddenly tired, a lethargy that made her trail off in conversation, an absence that overtook her. But then, she thought, those weeks before the holidays had been frenetic, carved in sharp relief by adrenalin, hunger and a biting sense of time running out as she’d scrambled to finish her literature review. She’d been rushing for weeks now; it was no wonder that her period was late. She’d stared again at the whiteness of her underwear as she’d wiped herself and dropped the tissue in the toilet, wondering when her cycle would be back to normal.

She’d slammed into the thought as if it were a wall.

For a moment she’d been frozen, her head a rattling void. Then she’d run down the stairs and out of the heavy front door towards the doctor’s surgery. Her hands had shaken as she made the appointment with a stern-faced receptionist, who’d eyed her naked fingers with small ungenerous eyes.

Days later, when her parents were out, she’d held the paper slip while sitting on the landing floor, staring at the red stamped letters – POSITIVE – in their neat white window. Eventually, soundlessly, she’d walked into the bathroom and flung the paper into the toilet. Leaning over the washbasin, she splashed her face with water. Straightening up, she stared at her reflection. In the mirror she saw the same face, startlingly unchanged from yesterday. Stella felt the wet skin on her bare neck tighten into goosebumps and heard her breath crashing in her chest. How could they have let this happen? Stupid stupid stupid. But as her breathing had slowed, in amongst the panic and the fear she’d sensed a glimmer of something else, a gentle rise inside herself, like the faintest strain of song. She’d phoned the lab and told John she was coming back, then called her mum at work. It had been impossible to ignore the note of disappointment in her mother’s voice, but she’d promised she’d be home again soon. She’d scribbled a note for her father, pushed her clothes in a bag and called for a taxi to take her to the station. The whistle had gone as she’d been running down the platform, and she’d had to tug at the door as the train started to move, jumping onto the step and slamming it shut behind her. The late-afternoon landscape unfurled as the train had picked up speed, and Stella had watched it with her head pressed to the cool glass, feeling her plans for the future slipping further away with every mile that passed.

An hour and a half later she’d descended cautiously from the train with the early evening sunlight behind her, her bag heavy on her shoulder. John had emerged at last through the rush of commuters, his face creased in thought, and she’d felt a rising flare of love for this earnest, angular man. He’d picked her up in the middle of the concourse and spun her in his arms.

‘Let’s go for dinner, shall we?’

Stella had nodded, putting off the revelation. Instead of going north to Kilburn, they’d headed south and emerged at Piccadilly into its circus of vulgar lights, passing home-bound office workers streaming down the steps into the station, tourists struggling with their maps and finely dressed theatre-goers gliding through the crowds to Shaftesbury Avenue and Haymarket.

John had led the way across the busy road, past the liveried doormen of the Piccadilly Hotel and up a narrow side street where he stopped outside a grubby-looking café.

‘It doesn’t look like much,’ he’d said, ‘but we might just see someone famous. It’s where all the actors eat between their shows.’

Stella had nodded and tried to smile as they’d sat down at a sticky-topped table and ordered pie and chips. Leaning across the table, John had held her hands between his as he told her about his research and all its latest findings. So much had happened, he’d told her, speaking so fast that Stella had struggled to follow. Eventually he’d paused as the waiter had clattered their steaming plates of food in front of them and Stella had taken her hands from his.

‘John.’

There had been a note to her voice that he’d not heard before.

‘Stel? Are you OK? I’m sorry – there’s so much happening, am I going on too much?’

He’d lifted his eyes to hers, but she did not return his lopsided smile as she raked her hair from her face with both hands.

‘I need to tell you – that is, God, I don’t know how to say – it’s just – I’m pregnant, John.’

He’d stared at her, his face blank, his eyes distant. ‘Oh …’

In two words, the world as he knew it had been transformed. The future, which until that moment had existed for him only as a concept, became something material, a bulb of cells multiplying within Stella’s soft pink flesh. He looked down at the untouched pie and chips and remembered that first sharp moment when he’d seen her, flushed and stuttering because she’d spilt his drink. He’d known, of course, the biology of his need: the pheromones and oxytocin, the elemental programming that sustained the human race. And yet, somehow, he’d understood in that first rush of desire the same truth that he saw now with this baby; that – expedient as they were – these basic functions of human life were each a kind of a miracle.

‘John? Aren’t you going to say something?’

He’d felt the twang of anxiety in Stella’s voice and looking up he’d been perplexed to see tears in her eyes. He’d asked her what was wrong and when she’d answered he had laughed, amused by how illogical she could be. Of course they would get married – this was their own little miracle! They’d kissed across the table, certain that life was good.

But now in Finchley, it all felt far from miraculous. Around the table, John tried to catch his father’s eye, but both his parents were concentrating hard on the remains of their Sunday roast.

‘So you see, Mum, Dad, we didn’t want a fuss.’

His mother looked up, smiling with her lips pressed into a tight line. ‘Yes, darling. We understand.’

But Stella could hear their disapproval in the silence on either side of what they said. She turned words over in her head. At least tell us you’re angry! But she knew she wouldn’t be able to bring herself to say them aloud.

John’s father coughed, looking at each of them in turn as if to signal that the wedding conversation was at an end. ‘What about the bomb near you, then?’ he said, shaking his head. ‘It’s a terrible thing to say, but I don’t even get shocked by that sort of thing any more.’

It was true, Stella thought. There had been so many bombs going off over the past few years, she too had begun to feel immune to the horror until she’d stood up close to that unnatural scene of charred walls and blown-out windows and bloodied survivors.

John nodded at his father, accepting the change of direction. ‘It was awful. Like a war zone, but just there on our doorstep. And those people – do you remember, Stella, that guy they brought out?’

Stella tried to blink away the image of the man as he lay on the ground, his eyes fixed on hers from his blood-streaked face.

‘Oh, how horrible!’ John’s mother clasped her hands together.

Stella turned to her new mother-in-law. ‘It was horrific, Mrs Greenwood.’

She’d expected to be corrected, It’s ‘Mum’ now, Stella. But the older woman said nothing as she gathered their plates and left the room. Stella noticed that the feeling in the room had changed again.

John’s father leaned forward. ‘We don’t have money, you know, Stella. There’s no gold to dig here.’

John blinked, unsure if he’d imagined the words. But Stella’s flushed cheeks and her tightening grip around his wrist told him he had not.

‘Mr Greenwood—’ Stella began, a waver in her voice.

But John interrupted. ‘Dad! Where did that come from? What are you thinking?’

His father scowled. ‘What am I thinking? What are you thinking? Knocking up a girl you hardly know, getting married on the sly, breaking your mother’s heart while you’re at it, it’s—’

‘Stop! Please.’ Stella stood up. ‘John, I’m going to go—’

John’s mother had brought in a trifle from the kitchen. ‘Won’t you stay for dessert?’ she asked Stella, who laughed despite herself.

‘Oh, no, we’d better not. Thanks very much for a lovely lunch.’

The words seemed to exist in a world apart from the strange chaos that her body had become; it was as if she were reading them off a card. John kissed his mother’s cheek, then took Stella’s arm and led her out of the house.

‘Well,’ he said as they walked to the Tube, ‘that could have been a lot worse.’

Stella looked at him and he broke into a wide grin. She punched him on the arm, not quite hard enough to hurt.

‘You utter bastard,’ she said and they both started to laugh.